A typical prior art ATM a switching network is known from J. S. Turner, "Design of a Broadcast Packet Network", published in "Proceedings of INFOCOM '86", April 1986, pages 667 to 675.
The term "ATM system" (ATM=Asynchronous Transfer Mode) as used herein means any information transmission system in which the information is split into parts of equal or unequal length and transmitted, together with a connection-specific header, as a sequence of packets or cells.
The above-referenced switching network is a switching network with multiple paths. It is constructed exclusively from 2.times.2 switching elements. Generally, however, switching elements are needed which can arbitrarily connect as large a number of inputs to as large a number of outputs as possible. In this manner, only few stages have to succeed one another, so that delays, delay jitter, and cell losses are kept to a minimum. However, such switching elements should be combined in integrated circuits, in which at least the number of leads cannot be enlarged without difficulty. In ATM systems, because of the high transmission rate, which is expected to be about 150 Mb/s or even 600 Mb/s, parallel data transfer will frequently be necessary.
It is also known to replace larger switching elements by switching-network modules which are constructed from several switching elements and act outwardly like one large switching element. Such a switching-network module should be nonblocking.